Companies who rely on Microsoft Azure to power their online services are having a rough afternoon. A number of the services provided by Microsoft’s cloud platform are currently down in regions around the world.

Users of the Virtual Machine, Cloud Services and Website products provided by Azure are the hardest hit by the outage, which also encompasses Automation, Service Bus, Backup, Site Recovery, HDInsight and Mobile Services in certain regions.

Right now, Azure Virtual Machines are down across 11 of Microsoft’s 13 regions, including all but one of its regions in the U.S. Azure’s US East region is experiencing outages across the greatest number of services, while the US South Central and Asia Pacific Southeast regions appear unaffected by the outage.

The Azure core platform components, including Azure Active Directory, have not been affected. On its service status website, Microsoft said that it is working on a fix, and users should see service restoration as updates are applied to the affected services. It’s not clear yet what caused the outage, or when users can expect service to return to normal.

It’s been a rough past few days for Microsoft, which recently pulled updates to Windows 8.1 following reports that they were causing crashes for some users.

Update: According to the service status site, Azure is back to normal. No word on what caused the outage, though.

Blair Hanley Frank is GeekWire's Bay Area Correspondent. He has also worked for Macworld, PCWorld and TechHive. Follow him on Twitter @belril and email him at blair@geekwire.com.